It's hard to say the 2023-24 season has been anything but a disaster for the Detroit Pistons.
Fans had moderate expectations coming into the season, as few thought the Pistons would contend for anything more than the back end of the play-in tournament, but even that meager goal is laughable at this point.
We are over 60 games into the season and the Pistons still don't have double-digit wins and it will take a hot finish for them to not end up with the worst record in team history.
This would be expected if the Pistons were in the first year of their rebuild, but this is year four and other teams on the same timeline have made the progress that Detroit has not.
So who is most to blame for this mess of a season? There is plenty to go around.
Playing the blame game with the Detroit Pistons
The players
No one likes to blame the players. When they mess up, it is somehow always the coach's fault, but we rarely admit that it is the players, not the coaching staff, that ultimately decides games.
The team still makes all of the same bad mistakes they've been making for the last four seasons. The Pistons commit the second-most turnovers in the NBA, and if you watch the games, you'll see that many of them are of the unforced variety. This isn't just coaching, it's carelessness.
The Pistons lead the league in fouls per game, again, somewhat a product of their inexperience, but at some point players have to take accountability for constantly biting on pump fakes, closing out recklessly and not doing the simple things like moving their feet. The Pistons have several lazy fouls per game where they reach in instead of moving their feet, often 50 feet away from the basket.
Detroit's defense has gotten worse this season and there's not much evidence of individual improvement from their core outside of Ausar Thompson, who was already a good defender before he got to the Motor City. Defense is about will and effort and the Pistons often show neither.
Yes, some of this can be attributed to youth and a bad roster, but these aren't children. The Pistons are the 8th-youngest team in the NBA and all seven of the younger teams are ahead of them in the standings.
We can't blame youth and inexperience forever, at some point the Detroit Pistons have to show some pride in their individual defense and stop making the same lazy mistakes we've been seeing throughout this entire rebuild.
Monty Williams
We've been piling on Monty Williams all season, and while some of it is deserved criticism, this is not all on him.
Williams walked into a mess of a situation, and if you want to blame him for anything, it should be taking a job that he didn't have a passion or desire to take.
But we can point the finger at some of the ways he's used his roster, from his up-and-down relationship with Jaden Ivey to his fascination with Killian Hayes and Isaiah Livers to his inability to adjust his starting lineup to maximize the potential of his core players.
We're no closer to knowing how this roster and the eight players who will be on it next season fit together, which should have been the only objective after it became abundantly clear this team wasn't going to compete for a playoff spot.
It took Williams nearly 60 games just to settle on a starting lineup and his rotation has had no consistency and often no logic. Players have not fallen into consistent roles and there are more questions about how some of these players fit in (Jaden Ivey, Isaiah Stewart, Marcus Sasser) than there are answers.
While I don't put the Pistons' abysmal record on coach Williams, I do blame him for not plugging his players into consistent and defined roles so that they can work specifically on the things that will make them successful NBA players.
Troy Weaver
Where do I even start? It may be that we gave Troy Weaver too much credit in the beginning for doing the things any GM could have done.
It's easy to purge a roster of players, especially when you have an owner who is willing to eat money like some sort of capitalist hungry hungry Hippo.
It's easy to find talent in the top five of the draft, especially when you have the #1 pick. The beginning of this rebuild was the easy part, as anyone can bulldoze a crumbling house.
Weaver's wins have been few and far between and even in year four he still hasn't assembled a roster that makes any sense.
After suffering through the second-worst season in team history, Weaver did nothing in the offseason to improve the team. Instead, he doubled down on a bad, mismatched roster.
He paid $25 million to two backup centers, one of whom can't play defense and the other who can't do anything.
He neglected to address the wing or power forward position even though they were clear areas of need, instead, he traded up to take another undersized guard in the draft after making a nice (and obvious) pick of Ausar Thompson with his first pick.
He held onto veterans for too long, eventually giving them away for far less than he could have gotten if he had just traded them last season.
The Pistons are the worst team in the NBA and have been (or close) for the last four seasons and yet they somehow still OWE a first-round draft pick to the Knicks, which almost seems impossible when you look at the war chest of picks other rebuilding teams have accumulated.
He's made some good moves on the fringes (getting Simone Fontecchio was a win if they can keep him) and he's found some talent in the draft, but we still have no idea if his "Core" can even play together long-term, as they currently have the worst net rating of any five-man lineup that has played meaningful minutes together this season.
He can pay lip service to financial flexibility, being nimble (like a sprite in a forest) but he has created a bad roster that no sane free agent would want to join, so who cares if they have cap space?
The Detroit Pistons are still a hot mess, even worse than last season. There are no quick fixes and the worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a plan.
Tom Gores
The Detroit Pistons haven't won a playoff game since the Barack Obama administration, and while Gores wasn't owner for all of that time, he is the common denominator of their futility since 2011.
He has often gotten credit for "staying of the way" and for "hiring good basketball people" even though every coach and GM he's been through has been an abject failure.
He has stayed out of the way until it is time to make a pivotal decision and then his fingerprints have been all over the wrong ones. He's chased star coaches instead of star players, ignoring his "basketball people" in the process.
When he has chased players, they've been the wrong ones, as he was behind Andre Drummond's puzzling max contract and the decision to trade for Blake Griffin.
You can blame coaches, GMs and players but ultimately finger pointing has to start at the top with the guy who has been here longer than any of them and hasn't won anything.
Imagine owning a professional sports team for 13 seasons and not winning a single playoff game. It would be difficult if you tried given the parity that is now ingrained into pro sports.
Unfortunately, blaming the owner won't do much, as he's not even around to hear it. As much as Tom Gores talks about "the community," he spends painfully little time in it, as he lives in LA and is more likely to pop up at Crypto.Com Arena than at LCA.
So the "Sell the team" chants are raining down on the wrong people and will continue to as long as Gores owns the team. He's good for a few press conferences and appearances per season but outside of that, he seems checked out.
The best part of this season is that it is nearly over, another wasted year for fans of the Detroit Pistons, who went from cheering to one of the most successful teams in the NBA to wondering how we became a laughingstock.